


raise the stakes (smoke you out)

by notorious



Category: Legacies (TV 2018)
Genre: F/F, get lit kids, idk why i rated this m, other than the fact that it feels dirtier than it actually is, yowza babey
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-06
Updated: 2020-07-06
Packaged: 2021-03-05 05:28:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,288
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25109248
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notorious/pseuds/notorious
Summary: hope and lizzie. a demon. a rave. some drugs.
Relationships: Hope Mikaelson/Lizzie Saltzman
Comments: 8
Kudos: 69





	raise the stakes (smoke you out)

**Author's Note:**

> there’s a lot going on here. don’t ask me about any of it. sparsely edited. title from seven devils by florence + the machine.

**_NOW._ **

“She’s definitely possessed,” Hope tells Josie and Ric eleven days after her initial investigation.

For the moment they don’t seem to care.

“And where the hell have  _ you _ been?” is all she gets from the headmaster. He looks grumpy, ruffled, disheveled, like he’s been worrying too much and drinking too little.

Hope does not have a good answer to that.

Gone?

Away?

Indisposed?

“Undercover?” she proposes instead, sounding off the word like it’s a question. Her lips are still sprinkled with way too many nerve endings. Words on her tongue still feel like warm sand beneath her feet.

“You went dark for nearly two _ weeks _ , Hope,” Josie says. She looks weary, Hope thinks, and sounds it, too, and the tribrid aches to reach across the desk and caress her friend’s cheek because a touch would convey so much more than words ever could.

It hasn’t felt like two weeks, eleven days, what have you. It’s felt like one long hour, daylight and nightfall bleeding together like watercolor on cardstock, meshing like the tiny tines of velcro, seeping into one single infinite instant.

Time doesn’t move as it should when demons and drugs are involved.

Hope tips her head back and marvels at the popcorn ceiling, its dips and dives, and the little shadows tucked away in littler craters. Her heart flutters in her chest. She wills herself to focus. When she picks up her head it feels too light. If it weren’t connected to her torso by the neck she thinks it’d bounce and bob like a buoy in the current, a happy little something in the water.

“Can we worry about Lizzie being possessed and come back to my disappearance, say, never?”

Ric sighs. “Fine,” he agrees, only after a sobering stare from his remaining daughter. “Possessed by  _ what _ , now?”

“Lilith,” Hope says like it’s nothing, like it isn’t the Mother of Demons they’re dealing with.

**_ELEVEN DAYS AGO._ **

Hope doesn’t know how she ended up in a party in an old warehouse in Richmond.

Okay, she does. Technically.

“We’re going to the city,” Lizzie announced at lunch.

Hope didn’t know who ‘we’ meant, but she didn’t recall signing herself up for a Saltzman field trip. Was about to tell Lizzie as much, too, when she caught the look in her eyes: light, commanding, alive. A look Hope couldn’t say no to because it was a mix of yearning and power and she’d never seen Lizzie wield both of those at once.

But she doesn’t remember agreeing to attend a rave, and she’ll stand by that.

Also isn’t sure how Lizzie managed to talk her into a pair of hot pink daisy dukes and an itty-bitty mesh top with heart shaped pasties underneath, but hey, when in Rome.

No.

She’s supposed to be on recon.

Glorified babysitting.

Ric’s been skeptical of Lizzie lately, of her attitude, and he might’ve mentioned a noticeable shift in morals, but Hope’s not terribly focused on what her headmaster sent her off with his daughter to do any longer.

She’s starting to lose herself.

Or beginning to find herself.

Depends on how you look at it.

Only thing she knows for sure is it’s been just over an hour since Lizzie softened her up with rum and cherry soda out behind the warehouse. Since Lizzie backed her up against the bricks and kissed her, licked into her mouth, left a little yellow pill behind on her tongue. Hope didn’t ask questions. The icy grandeur in Lizzie’s dusky blue eyes told her all she needed to know.

So an hour and change has passed and Hope’s heart is starting to go haywire in her chest, but it feels all right, like everything’s progressing as it should, so she doesn’t question it. Just takes a good long look around because she’s been focused on Lizzie and hasn’t given these Richmond kids a chance.

The warehouse is dark, but only in bursts. Most of what Hope can see is neon and strobes catching the shine of sweat on cheeks and shoulders and bare thighs. The music is loud and unfamiliar, but unfamiliarity pales in comparison to the tendrils of beauty that bend and bubble until they breach Hope’s heart and find a home in which to burst. In her blood, in her bones, they spread, and it’s like she’s right there while the song is recorded live and suddenly all Hope wants is to  _ move _ .

In a word, lofty. 

It’s all  _ up _ .

It’s warm and it’s comforting, all-encompassing, and Hope is Jonah and the music is the whale and this warehouse in Richmond is its belly. 

She’s been swallowed whole. 

She’d be just fine if she never went home.

She’d be better if the music never left her.

Best if she’s with Lizzie.

Lizzie, who looks proud of herself when Hope tracks her down, whose blue eyes have surrendered to black, who moves like the music was born from her, who beams like the world is her playground. Who has a circle of partygoers undulating around her like moths to a light, praising, worshipping her while she twirls in the middle, hands high above her tipped-back head, lips parted like she’s breathing in energy from the air.

Hope doesn’t think she’s ever seen anything so beautiful.

When Lizzie pulls Hope into her circle and right up against her, chest to chest, arms draped around Hope’s neck and fingers lost in the loose auburn waves, the tribrid knows she wouldn’t hesitate if the siphon asked her to follow her off a cliff.

In the dim pulsing light Lizzie glows, warm and golden, ringed by a thin line of light, and for the first time in her life Hope gets to look at her in high definition. Until now she’s only ever seen Lizzie through the lens of an age-old camcorder, grainy and inconsistent, and the new vision is bliss.

“I could spend the rest of my life looking at you,” Hope muses aloud, words like taffy on her tongue. She has to lean in and up, has to nestle her lips against Lizzie’s ear, doesn’t have to clutch at her back that hungrily but does it anyhow, to make sure she’s heard. “Just looking. I’d die a happy woman.”

And those words don’t sound like Hope, no, they’re too mushy, too forward, and too romantically idealistic to have come from the mouth of the tribrid. But she’d said them, and they hadn’t felt wrong, just as catching her lips against Lizzie’s jaw and mouthing at her sweat-slick skin doesn’t feel wrong. Hope doesn’t think anything she does with Lizzie is ever going to feel wrong, not after tonight, because she’s certain they’ll be breaking more boundaries than either one of them knew they had before heading back to Mystic Falls.

“You got an Airbnb?” she asks Lizzie hours later on a curb a few blocks down from the warehouse.

“A loft with floor-to-ceiling windows and a rain shower. Why?”

Hope doesn’t answer right away. There’s a lot she could say, a lot she  _ wants _ to say, but it’s easiest to take Lizzie by the hand and draw her thumb over the siphon’s wrist like she’s made of silk. Hope’s never felt anything so soft. And then she pulls, and Lizzie’s molding into her, tucking into the negative space around Hope’s body, and it’s a little overwhelming in all the right ways.

She wonders how long Lizzie’s been planning this jaunt to Richmond, reckons it doesn’t matter how long, only that they’re there together. She doesn’t want to be doing this with anybody else.

Logically, yes, Hope knows she’s on drugs. There was a moment after they kissed, a moment where the pill sat on her tongue and Lizzie stood before her in silence, a moment where she could’ve spit it to the ground and seethed, but she didn’t take the out. Took the dose instead.

It doesn’t feel like she’s on drugs. Just feels right.

And she’s still coherent. Calm.

But it feels like the world itself is born again, brand new, bursting at the seams with brilliance Hope’s never even dreamt of. It feels like waking up  _ into _ a dream, she thinks, but her dreams aren’t anything like this. Her dreams have a wicked history of being twisty, of dragging her down, of making her endlessly grateful every time she wakes up come sunrise. Her dreams are known to scare her, but there is no fear here, only wonder.

At the loft Lizzie pours red wine into coffee mugs and takes Hope to the couch. Leather on her bare legs, cool to the touch, is a bit like tucking into the palm of a giant hand. They sit and drink and don’t do much other than exchange feather-light touches, distracted and delicate, fingertips testing the waters, Lizzie’s hand riding the waves that make up Hope: the dip of her waist, the swell of her hip, the treacherous and titanic wake that is the inside of her thigh.

They’re still clutching on to drinks when Lizzie pulls Hope onto her lap and takes her mouth in a searing kiss that is as slow and exploratory as it is dangerous and daring; neither bother to acknowledge when their teeth bump, both gasp when Lizzie sucks Hope’s tongue between her lips.

Hope’s got a hand at the nape of Lizzie’s neck, grasping and tugging at blonde locks, keeping her locked in place while Lizzie’s hand at the small of her back does the very same to her.

When she pulls back for air seconds, minutes — hours? — later she nearly crushes the mug of merlot with her bare hands.

Lizzie’s eyes aren’t black, no, but they will be soon. They’re cloudy, like smog, and darkening rapidly. Take a dirty paintbrush and dip it in clear water and the color seeps slow and steady until the liquid’s sullied and undrinkable. Polluted. 

Hope lays a hand on Lizzie’s sternum and eases back, asking, “Liz?” in a voice that sounds far too small to be coming from her own mouth.

“Close,” Lizzie tells her in a voice that is entirely her own, just heavier, echoing like thunder within Hope’s skull. “Guess again.”

Speechless.

Or distracted, maybe, now that Lizzie’s eyes are blacker than the midnight sky and deeper than the deepest depths of every ocean. It’s a mighty fine night for a swim.

“Need a clue?”

“I—”

Lizzie growls, flips them. Wine spills over the couch, drips down the back, and for a moment Hope wonders how much extra cash they’ll have to forfeit to have the rug cleaned.

“Two of my children —  _ dead _ ,” she hisses. The room darkens, wind picks up. “Because of  _ you _ .”

However many monsters Hope’s put down in the last two years...she doesn’t know, can’t count right now, can hardly catch her breath with Lizzie’s arm across her shoulders and keeping her trapped as a bird in a cage. A caged bird, at the very least, Hope thinks, has room enough to stretch its wings. She, on the other hand, can hardly move.

Hope just blinks.

“Am I to simply take your word that more have not died at your hand?”

“Lizzie,” Hope pleads, holding on to those black eyes and praying she doesn’t disappear into them. “I want to talk to Lizzie.”

“Oh, she’s here,” the demon says, and laughs. “She thinks you look scared.  _ I _ think she likes that. The mighty tribrid, helpless. For such a  _ powerful _ little creature, I’m surprised you haven’t figured it out who I am by now.”

“—children,” Hope manages, furrowing her brow. “You said your children are dead because of me.”

The air crackles. Lizzie’s arm lets up and for a moment Hope can breathe with her whole chest, but only a moment, because before she can manage another breath a hand closes around her throat.

“The oni,” the demon says, “the Oneiros. Many more, I’m sure.”

_ Oh _ , Hope thinks.

“Mother of Demons,” she whispers.

Lizzie grins, wicked and wide, blinding and boastful, and Hope’s never been so terrified and turned on all at once.

_ Shit _ .

**_NOW, AGAIN._ **

“And it took you  _ eleven days _ to figure this out?” Ric’s pacing. Pacing and eyeing the desk drawer Hope knows he stashes bourbon in.

No.

It took her one and a half.

But, “More like six,” she says instead. “That woman is a nightmare to get information out of.”

“And the other five?” Josie asks gently, sensing her father’s readiness to become frantic and largely unreasonable. “Why so long?”

“She wanted to burn it all down,” Hope says, shrugs. “I kept on her tail to keep the city standing.”

No, again.

Well — okay, yes, Lilith  _ did _ threaten to level Richmond to the ground, among other things, but Hope had taken care of that on days three through eleven.

Ric presses his palms against his eyes, sighs. “You didn’t think to call for backup?” He looks desperate, Hope thinks, even though the whole thing is handled.

“She would’ve fled,” she says simply.

Once again: no.

Lilith would’ve killed her along with every other sad sack in Richmond, but Hope’s not about to bring that up.

“But you got her to come back,” Josie insists, shaking her head, “how?”

“Brilliant negotiation tactics?”

“ _ Hope _ .”

“Fine.” The tribrid rolls her eyes. “She wanted fealty. After she let me talk to Lizzie, we reached a mutual agreement.”

“And?”

“I took care of it. She’ll be out of Lizzie’s system in a day or two.”

Josie frowns, unsure, prompts, “But what did she want?”

And then it’s Hope’s turn to grin, wicked and wild, blinding and blissful, and knows that’s a secret she’ll take into the ground with her because —

—  _ me _ , Hope thinks, that’s what she wanted.


End file.
